In the hottest week of the year and the hottest consecutive spell in September on record, it’s easy to go along with the climate crisis narrative.
While the Met’s chief meteorologist explained that the mini heatwave was caused by tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic pushing the jet stream north, climate alarmists ramped up the rhetoric.
The current conditions in the UK were made five times more likely by the climate crisis, according to analysis by Climate Central, as reported in The Guardian.
Climate Central describes itself as ‘an independent group of scientists and communicators who research and report the facts about our changing climate and how it affects people’s lives’, one of many spin-offs of the climate change industry.
Recent heatwaves in Europe and the US are also blamed on man-made warming by the UK based Climate Group and by World Weather Attribution, organisations that exist to interpret extreme weather events as evidence of looming catastrophe.
Whether you believe we are on the cusp of a climate Armageddon or merely accept the threats posed by the rising mercury – and polls suggest a majority of Britons support action on climate change such as net zero targets – there is no denying that the weather is big business.
Which can make getting to the truth about the impact of warming temperatures on the world problematic.
This week, the revelations of an American climate scientist highlighted how skewed the truth has become within his own community.
Dr Patrick Brown, the co-director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley and a lecturer at John Hopkins University, published a paper arguing that climate change had increased wildfires in California.
He later admitted he had exaggerated the effect of global warming in order to get his paper published in Nature magazine.
Other causes, such as poor forestry management and an increase in people starting fires, accidentally or deliberately, were also responsible for the fires, he said. In fact, more than 80 per cent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.
But presenting the broader picture to the editors of prestigious scientific journals was apparently akin to career suicide.
“The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative,” Brown wrote in a blog and on Twitter.
“Why did I focus exclusively on the impact of climate change? I wanted the research to get as widely disseminated as possible, and thus I wanted it to be published in a high-impact journal.
“When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula I outlined here, my papers were promptly rejected out of hand by the editors of high-profile journals without even going to peer review. This type of framing, where the influence of climate change is unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers.
“It is standard practice,” he concluded, “to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility while ignoring potential changes to technology and resilience that would lessen the impact.”
The editor of Nature, in response, attempted to discredit Brown, questioning his “poor research practices”.
In a field of science so complex, often reliant on modelling and with implications for the whole of mankind, it is surely imperative that scientists are allowed to speak openly about their findings.
Brown is certainly not the first sceptic to be traduced by the people in his sector. The bête noire of the climate consensus is the Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg who, while believing in man-made climate change, argues against doomsday scenarios and for the prioritisation of expensive mitigation policies.
For this, Lomborg is regarded in climate circles as a dangerous heretic but, agree with him or not, he is not preaching death and destruction, only another, perhaps saner approach to a world-wide challenge.
Hysteria around global warming has resulted in more credence being given to truly nutty statements than to the voices of reason.
In June 2018, Greta Thunberg foretold the end of the world, tweeting: “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.”
And in 2009, the then Prince of Wales, often so wise on environmental matters, predicted that we had just 96 months to avert “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”.
Well, we’re still here and still facing weather-related threats to our existence, and, in fact, handling them increasingly successfully.
Tragic as the fires that ravaged Greece and Hawaii were – now believed, respectively, to have been mostly started ‘by human hand’ or by the failures of the electric utility company – we have learnt to adapt to global warming.
Mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by more than 90 per cent since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events, according to research.
Extreme weather events now contribute only 0.07 per cent to global mortality, indicating that we are coping better with such events than with the other causes of mortality.
Meanwhile, cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, a study published in the Lancet found.
Scientists who dare to point out these inconvenient truths risk having their reputations trashed, and few media outlets depart from one-sided climate coverage, delivered by grim faced environment correspondents in scold mode.
Even raising the contradictions in the climate debate is seen (in inappropriately extremist terminology) as ‘denial’, so reasonable doubts are not explored and crazy schemes are allowed to flourish – such as the Scottish government’s carbon offsetting programme that favours tree planting over rural jobs.
The real problem of global warming deserves serious thinking and rational solutions. It is ill-served by hype masquerading as science and the silencing of informed opinion that happens to contradict the creed.
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